ABSTRACT
Although the social theorists we encountered in the previous chapter blazed a trail for a new urban imaginary that could co-exist with the modernist ideas of positive sociology, dialectical materialism and phenomenology, it was a quite different set of preoccupations that drove the true pioneers of urban studies to the investigation of the ‘underworld’ of the sprawling metropolis. Although the writers that we encounter in this chapter could all be described broadly as ‘empirical researchers’, that is not to say that a dichotomy between ‘theoretical’ and ‘empirical’ urbanists requires practitioners of one technique to avoid use of the other. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Weber’s meticulous reconstructions of the ancient and medieval cities of Europe are rich in the sort of detail one would expect from an expert social and economic historian, just as
contemporary writing on the sociology of shopping to shame.
